New Books for the New Year

For those who can’t face living in the present, the end of all the retrospective 2014 lists doesn’t have to spell doom. It’s time for year-ahead lists. So what does 2015 promise for readers?

“God Help the Child,” due in April, is a short new novel by the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison about childhood trauma and its reverberations in adulthood. From the slender to the sizable, April also sees the publication in English of the fourth volume of “My Struggle,” Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series of six autobiographical novels. This one finds him as a teenager, attempting to kick-start a writing career while teaching at a school in a tiny village in the Arctic. Contemplation, no doubt, ensues.

“Our Souls at Night,” the last novel by Kent Haruf, who died at 71 in November, is slated for May. It’s set in the fictional town of Holt, Colo., which will be familiar to readers of Haruf’s previous novels. The same month, Nell Zink, whose short novel “The Wallcreeper” drew praise just this past October, wastes no time publishing her second book, “Mislaid,” also in May.

September will bring at least one guaranteed best seller: Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Purity,” which revolves around a young woman named Purity, or Pip, who investigates the identity of her father. Also scheduled for September is “The Tsar of Love and Techno,” a collection of stories by Anthony Marra, whose first novel, “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,” was published in 2013 to widespread acclaim.

“I write as good as I can, and don’t try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know. I’ve had some people tell me that they knew they were great and that they would live in literature forever, and my response is to pat them on the back and say, ‘Maybe you’ll feel better tomorrow.’ ” — Donald Hall, in an interview with NPR

A Fuller Following

Edith Pearlman, whose new collection, “Honeydew,” is reviewed this week, has made only a few brief appearances in the Book Review. An assessment in 2005 of “How to Fall,” her third book, described the author as “widely published if narrowly known.” More people learned her name in 2012, when “Binocular Vision,” a gathering of old and new stories, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

In an interview at the time with The Millions, Pearlman said: “I am an overnight sensation of a sort. I have been writing for 40 years and this is my fourth book. And I always had a small following. And I never expected to have any bigger following. I would go to my grave with a small collection, happy.”